Tag Archives: tv

best of 2009: coming to a screen near me

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

I haven’t posted in the challenge lately because I don’t have good picks for the topics from the past week and a half. But I do have something to write about today.

December 30 — Ad. What advertisement made you think this year?

I don’t pay attention to advertisements all that much. I usually ignore them on television and I skip over ads in magazines and generally ignore them on the Internet. But I do try to see promo spots for new and favorite TV shows and I try to catch the preview for the next episode of shows I’m watching. I don’t mind spoilers all that much (I can’t really complain too much about them: I often skim the ending of a book after reading some of it…might sound nuts to you but it’s what I’ve been doing for decades. I read slowly and I’ll get to some good part and want to know now what will happen, not wait ’til I reach it. So I start skimming and suddenly, I’ve skipped to the end. Rest assured, I still go back and read the whole book. But that’s not the point here, is it).

My best of 2009 advertisements are fun things: commercials for TV shows. Some were just well done — Dexter comes to mind — and some were welcome announcements that a good show was returning would soon be back, such as My Boys and Eureka. And then there were the ads promoting a new show, USA Network’s White Collar. They intrigued me and I am a fan of the show now. So they worked :-).

But I have to say, the best promotional ads for the past few years have been most of those for USA Network’s show Psych. The cast there clearly has fun doing their ads and “psych outs” and they are always a hoot. I will stop fast forwarding and even back up a recorded show just to see their ads. Doesn’t hurt that I find the show a lot of fun, too.

Hmm, I have more to write but I think I’ll go relax with a bit of TV now….

best of 2009: not high art, but …

I’m trying something new for me this month, a web community challenge: Gwen Bell’s The Best of 2009 Blog Challenge. Find the best the year has offered me, and review, remember, contemplate, reflect, and celebrate it. There’s a question/topic each day.

So today we have: December 3 — Article.…. Gwen asks for the one that “blew you away.”

Gotta confess: I don’t read that much onscreen. It feels wrong and bothers my eyes a lot…plus I don’t like to read sitting up most of the time and I don’t have a computerly setup to use to read lounging around. I read news stories and work related sites at the office and I look at links sent by friends for fun stuff. But I don’t travel the web a lot, going from site to site, blog to blog. I’ve been doing it more and more lately, but still not a lot.

I thought of a few articles that stood out this year, inspiring me, making me think and act and laugh and cry, but they just weren’t the single standout webpage find of 2009.

The one thing that did blow me away was finding a video of something I think about often, but hadn’t seen for way too long. It’s the opening credits of the TV show Cupid, the original version starring Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall. I loved that show. I know it’s not high art and these days I don’t think it’s the best show ever made. But I enjoyed it; no, I savored it, and to this day I miss it. I bought the Pretenders album Viva el Amor! and memorized the song Human which was used in the opening. And one day at work this summer, I was looking at a Youtube link someone had emailed and in a moment of inspiration I searched for and found Cupid. Ahhhhhh. Now if they would just collect the series on DVD, I’d buy it in a second.

Here’s the link to the page on Youtube, though you might not enjoy this as much as I do :-):

Youtube - Cupid - Intro

Youtube - Cupid - Intro